The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

The corn in the ditch

I did not scream at him. I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about it since, and I am not proud of everything I felt that afternoon, but I am glad I did not scream.

What I felt was a kind of heat behind my eyes. I had picked those ears by hand starting before daylight, row by row, in the two acres behind our house, the way Elsie had shown me.

After the truck was gone, I climbed down into the ditch in my work boots. Zeke came running down from the yard, and I started handing ears up to him, and he set them on the wagon bed, one at a time, careful, like they were eggs.

It was no use and I knew it was no use. Sweet corn that has been rolled through a road ditch, with the gravel dust and the weed seed and whatever runs off a county road, is not corn you hand a family for supper.

Tim Bauer from the next farm east came by on his way back from the elevator. He pulled his pickup off behind my wagon and got out without asking what happened, which is how you know a man has lived on a road a long time.

“Quincy?” was all he said.

“Quincy,” I said.

Tim climbed down into the ditch with me. He did not say anything else for twenty minutes. We pitched every ear up onto the wagon, and when we were done he took his cap off and wiped his forehead with his arm.

“I’ll take it for the hogs if you want,” he said. “Seems a waste, but they won’t mind the ditch.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked at the road toward Quincy’s place. “He’s not been right since March,” he said. “You know that.”

“I know that,” I said. And I did know it. That was the part that made it hard.

Where we were that summer

My name is Ione Hollander. I was twenty-nine that summer, and from August to May I drove a school bus for Clinton Central, a route of thirty-one kids out of Michigantown along the county roads north of Frankfort.

Bus drivers do not get paid in the summer. Sid and I had sat down in April with the checkbook and figured out that if I could clear about two thousand dollars between July and Labor Day, we could get Zeke’s teeth fixed without putting it on the card.

Sid, my husband, worked second shift at the Subaru plant in Lafayette. He left the house at two and got home after midnight. He was a good man with a hard schedule, and that is the only reason he was not on the road shoulder that day.

We had five acres on County Road 300 North, two miles west of his parents’ place. Sid had grown up on Quincy and Elsie’s farm, and when we married, Quincy had helped us buy the house and a corner of ground from the Wilson estate.

That spring I had planted two acres of sweet corn, a bicolor called Peaches and Cream that Elsie always said was the only corn worth the work. I staggered the plantings two weeks apart so I would have corn from the middle of July into the end of August.

I bought an old hay wagon at a farm sale near Rossville for three hundred dollars. Sid put new boards on the rack and I painted the side boards white. It was not a fancy stand. It was a wagon on the shoulder, a card table, a coffee can, and a hand-lettered sign.

I priced the corn at five dollars a dozen because the grocery in town was selling it at six and I thought a new stand ought to come in under the store. I did not think about Quincy’s seven. I want to be honest about that. I did not think about it at all.

Or that is not quite true. I thought about it once, the day I painted the sign. I thought I should call him. And then I didn’t, because calling him would mean asking, and I was afraid he would tell me no.